


Lost in Space (and in Meaning)

by albaparthenicevelut



Series: The Good Ship Avenger [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Female Tony Stark, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-16 02:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7248187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/albaparthenicevelut/pseuds/albaparthenicevelut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony has been working and living on the Avenger for a year now. It hasn't been an entirely frictionless transition but she's settled into her new life. She tries not to think about the people she left behind. James Rhodes has accepted that his closest, oldest friend is floating (possibly in pieces) somewhere in the void of space, or at least he tries not to think of it. Fate in the form of Obadiah Stane intervenes.</p><p>A/N I changed the pairing on the fic because I have a really hard time capturing a romantic vibe between Rhodey and Tony, which is not to say that I don't like the pairing, I actually really do, but I have a hard time writing it. I'm also interested in having this be potentially a femmeslash series, so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was a run of the mill salvage mission, for a given value of run of the mill. They are passing close to Union territory, not dangerously close, but a bit closer than might be prudent. Nobody has ever accused the Avengers of common sense, genius? Occasionally. Bravery? Recklessness means the same thing, right? Effectiveness? Definitely. But not common sense.

They’ve been hearing rumors of a scuttled and abandoned Union ship, a strong lure to any scavenger boat. Union ships have excellent security systems and are dangerous to board and pick over but their parts go at thousands of marks in Independent and Colonial markets. Well worth the effort and danger, especially if you’ve got the designer of said security systems on your crew, which, hello? Tony Motherfucking Stark, anyone? Anyway, point is they are wandering down cold halls, guns primed for armed survivors and T-bots and whatever other defense systems might come online, despite Tony’s tinkering, when they encounter the first body. 

Ze is a young androgyne, wide dark eyes and fatal energy weapon burns right through zir abdominal cavity. They walk on, men, women, androgynes, androids, meta-humans, and cybrids lie scattered around the halls and rooms, all dead of various energy weapons, top of the line stuff. Stuff, in point of fact, that would be more at home in the arsenal of the Union forces than in that anyone attacking them. Tony should know; she used to design their weapons too. 

Natasha gives Clint and Sam an almost imperceptible nod and the two of them split off from the group. They’ll head to the supply rooms and raid the ship for anything useful. Weapons, rations, equipment… They are good at separating the gold from the dross. Bruce stops in the med bay and begins to root through the drawers Rogers jerks his chin at Thor and Thor follows the good doctor in. They have a buddy system on unfamiliar vessels, one of Rogers’ many rules.

She and Rogers keep on going, heading for the bridge to make sure the ship is truly empty before heading on the engine room so that Tony can work her particular magic. The bridge is a bubble of one-way smart glass, built to withstand the wear and tear of high-speed travel and act as a computer interface at the same time. As with the rest of the ship, it is littered with bodies, which is why it is something of a shock when a burst of fire nearly takes Tony’s head off. She and Rogers throw themselves to the ground and roll behind the command desk. Tony meets Rogers’ eyes and sees his particular brand of mad recklessness. 

“Cap-“ is all she gets out before Rogers throws himself up over the desk and tackles the person firing at them. Christ. Tony knows the guy has an uncanny facility for predicting positions based on angles and velocity but would it kill the guy to be even a little bit cautious around armed hostiles? God damn it. Then she throws herself over the desk and leaps after Rogers because she never claimed to be the sane one of the two of them.

Rogers has their assailant disarmed and pinned on the slick metal floor of the bubble and Tony only needs one glimpse of his face to know who it is.

“Rhodey?” She breathes out. Rhodey turns his head and stares at her. He is pale beneath his dark skin and sweating profusely.  
“Tony?” He rasps and then his eyes roll up and he passes out right there. Tony strides over.

“Get off, get off, get off. “ She chants. Rogers lets go and moves to the side without question. Without Rogers blocking her view it is clear that Rhodey has the same wounds that everyone else on the crew has. By some wonderful twist of fate, they are in relatively non-fatal places but that could change if he goes any further into shock. Tony leans down and hefts Rhodes up into a fireman’s carry. She is relatively unenhanced compared to Steve or Romanoff but between Extremis and her work as the ship's engineer, her strength is sufficient to carry Rhodey, a slim and relatively small man, the distance to the ship’s med bay.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jim Rhodes wakes up in a tiny berth. The ceiling is low and made of ugly gray metal. The bunk itself is narrow and cramped. Its walls are covered with schematics and notes, drawn on in white grease pencil in a familiar hand. Tony’s face, thinner, paler, and more lined than he remembered, swam before his eyes. So it hadn’t been a hallucination.

He rolled gingerly out of bed, wincing as the newly healed pink scars twinged on his abdomen. Someone had undressed him. That same person had laid out a pair of underwear and an old faded looking navy blue jumpsuit. He pulled both on and tried the door. It slid open easily under his touch. He looked out carefully. One side was a dead end; the other side led down a dimly lit corridor and then turned. He walked that way, moving carefully and quietly.

The corner brought him abruptly to a pair of grey doors, which swished open revealing a loud, brightly lit galley. There were more people crammed into it than comfortably fit the space but nobody seemed to mind being pressed shoulder to shoulder or even, in some cases, in each other’s laps. As one they turned to stare at him. A tall blond man disentangled himself from the limbs of another black man with ruddy brown skin. 

“Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes, I’m Steve Rogers. Welcome to the Avenger.” Jim isn’t paying him any attention. He’s searching the crowded room for somebody else. He finds her mashed in between a man with curly dark hair and sad eyes and a woman with bright red hair and an air of deadly calm. He drinks her in, cataloguing the changes and seeing her doing the same to him.  
She is smaller, shrunken at the edges. Her dark hair is flecked with white at the temples and buzzed close to her head, where once it would have been shoulder length, styled, and flawlessly dark. There are lines of pain around her eyes and mouth and she is pale in the way itinerant space folk always are, too much time spent on ships, not enough time planetside under bright suns.

He wonders what she sees. If she notices the grey in his close cut military buzz, the concomitant of two years of too much worry and work and too little sleep, and the lines of care between his eyes. Seeing her expressive dark eyes (the only unchanged thing about her) convinces him of the affirmative. Tony had always, even in the dark years of her flux addiction, seen him. It was why he’d stuck by her through so much shit.

He thinks about those years and he feels nothing but anger. He destroyed his career looking for Tony. When it seemed that she was dead he put himself into the line of fire of some very powerful people. He had not accepted the line that her double-dealing scheme had gone wrong, had fought the brass to investigate further, and he had paid a price for his loyalty. Obadiah Stane had ordered that attack on his ship. Rhodey knew this beyond any doubt, knew that he had nearly died for Tony’s memory and her good name and that his crew had died for their connection to him. Bile rose in the back of his throat. Collateral damage, the words were sickening.

Yet here Tony was. Alive and reasonably whole and she hadn't bothered to let him know? He had been on a quixotic mission to avenge his best friend and she hadn’t felt the need to send him the tiniest hint that she was still alive.The knowledge burned.

“Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you, Tony?” He said. He kept his voice carefully level. He always did, quiet, rational, stick in the mud Rhodey, honey bear, graham cracker, sugar lips, sweetie pie, pumpkin, a thousand ridiculous endearments, all mockery now. He wanted to scream.

“I didn’t- honey bear-“

“Don’t call me that.” She stops, bites her lip, looks down.

“Okay,” She says “Okay. I can, I can do that.” Her mouth is trembling slightly at the corners. A small tell, invisible to those who don’t know her, but a tell nonetheless.

“I’ve been looking for you for two years, Tony. I searched the dead zone for months and then when all I found were shreds of the group that had you, I went home and I tore through SI, through my department, everything. Potts and I traced the rotten shipments and found the rats and dragged them out into the light and we destroyed our lives doing it. Do you think the UMF likes the thought of keeping an officer around that could turn on them and expose their shit to the light? Nobody likes a whistleblower, Tony, but we did it for you, for your memory, so you wouldn’t have died a traitor. Potts doesn’t have a job anymore. She’s hiding out on Calliope, has been since the third assassination attempt, and I was being put on increasingly deadly missions, suicide missions, some might say and now it turns out you’re hiding on some salvage boat in the Diasporic belt? I’m glad you’re alive but we deserved better.” Tony swallows and as usual, starts babbling.

“I- I’m sorry. I couldn’t get back at first. I was sick and stranded and- I swear, I couldn’t, Rhodey and then once I could, so much time had passed and I thought.” She stopped, swallowed again. “I thought it would be kinder to leave you two alone, let you get on with your lives. I didn’t expect-“ She stopped but Rhodey could hear the bitten off words there, ‘didn’t expect you two to care so much.’ He snorted bitterly.

“It’s good to finally know how little you thought of us, how low your expectations of us were. You know what, I can’t do this. I’m going back to bed.” He turned around to walk out. There was a thump behind him and callused hands grabbed his wrist. He yanked his arm away but stopped.

“Rhodey, I’m sorry. Please, can we, can we just talk? Privately?” He considered, his situation, was he a captive, a guest, a fugitive? He needed information and he needed Tony, angry as he was.

“Okay. But only because I need you if I’m going to survive this and get back home.” He didn’t look back to see her expression. There was no need. he could hear the sharp indrawn breath. Nobody was better at hurting each other than he and Tony. It was nice to know that some things didn’t change.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony watched the angry lines of Rhodey’s shoulders as she followed him down the corridor. Only when they had re-entered her room and shut the door did he look at her.

“Alright then, explain,” he said. She the sick feeling in her throat increased. She chewed at her bottom lip, a new nervous habit. She has so many of those now.

“I made myself a weaponized, void-safe, exo-suit to get away from the Ten Rings but, well, dead zone, limited drip rations… nobody picked me up for three weeks. I was lucky anyone found me at all. By the time a IPS patrol picked me up, I was really ill. Drifting like that, alone in space… It does bad things to your head… well I’m sure you know, military training and all. I wasn’t in any condition to do much for a long time after. And then I thought, why bother them or kick up a fuss? Tony Stark is dead; good riddance. I didn’t check,” she held up both hands forestalling Rhodey’s angry remark, “It felt too painful to look back. I’m sorry.” 

Tony met Rhodey’s eyes with difficulty. She felt her throat locking shut as the memories torture and captivity and of vast isolation and darkness mingled with hot shame. She forced them back. Rhodey was watching her. His eyes had- not softened- but held a rough, angry sort of empathy.

“I missed you,” he said hoarsely. Tony looked down.

“I missed you too,” she said quietly. Rhodey heaved a long sigh.

“So what next?” he asked. “I’m guessing you guys can’t just drop me off at the closest United planet.”

“Ah no… we’re… well, maybe a little bit wanted by the United Interplanetary Crime Unit and a couple other alphabet agencies? Who is keeping track anyway. But we could drop you off on an Independent planet. You could get passage there on a more… ah, legit boat,” she replied. “Or…” she bit her lip uncertainly and looked down. His gaze felt heavy on her bent head. She forged forward, calling on her endless reserves of reckless stupidity. “Or you could stay here? We could use another fighter… and you understand the UMF even better than I do. We could use that.” He inspected her seriously.

“I’ve devoted my life to serving the Union, Tony. I can’t just join a group of Independent militants. That’s what this is right? You do some raiding, some scavenging, some smuggling… and gather intelligence for the Independent Militia along the way… Tony, I can’t do that.”

“You can! Rhodey, they’re corrupt, You know they’re corrupt, I know they're corrupt, we all know they're corrupt. You don’t owe them anything! They’ll kill you for real if you go back there. Please.” She looked up, meeting his eyes squarely. “Please, just stay here.”  
“What about Pepper?” He asked.

“We’ll think of something. My crewmates, they understand the need to look out for your friends.”

“You trust these people?” he asked. She met his eyes steadily and let the security, the sense of homecoming she felt onboard this ship, with these people, infuse her voice.

“With my life,” she said, “Hell, with your life.” He mulled that over.

“Then I guess I’d better go back out and meet them properly,” he said. Tony felt her lips twitching up into a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> There is going to be at least another chapter of this particular drabble.


End file.
